In one of his early poems the great German playwright and poet Gunter Eich (1907-72) wrote a line that has become almost proverbial: “Who would live without the solace of trees?”

It opens a poem titled simply “End of a Summer,” and I imagine that this line for most readers conjures up stately oaks or processional lindens – those grand trees of temperate climes whose chief solace comes from the rich leafiness and cool shade they provide. But trees offer all sorts of solace, and treeless places seem doubly alien. The windswept dunes that form the Magdalen Islands in Quebec or the high deserts of Egypt or of our own Southwest estrange not only because of their stark barrenness but because the landscape is unpunctuated by trees. Trees give scale and proportion to a vista. That spatial solace allows us to inhabit a landscape, if only in imagination.

As a child growing up in South Florida, my favorite tree was the banyan. It seemed to be a kind of arboreal metropolis, riddled with unexpected alleys and passageways. We liked to hide out in the thick pleats of its inverted roots, or made temporary lookout posts in the accommodating branches. Birds, of many species, held possession of the upper reaches of the banyan. Down below, among the ridges of the roots, fantastic insects founded colonies and competed with us for space. The roots themselves, stretching out over many yards, had a hospitable aspect, like the knuckles of protective hands. Despite their hollows and sudden chambers, the banyans withstood hurricanes with seeming ease. The solace they afforded was a kind of reassurance; the world would go on after all, despite those long nights of wind and blinding rain.

In my neighborhood, however, there was a tree that I regarded with a superstitious awe. This was a single specimen of baobab tree. Not only its bizarre shape but its peculiar dignity kept me from becoming too familiar with it. This solitary baobab, a refugee from Madagascar, dominated the lawn of a private house. It was too plump in shape to be entirely spooky; its bony tangle of branches spiking out of the stout column of the trunk suggested something sinister and genial at once, and that was enough to keep kids at a distance.

I’ve been fascinated by this tree ever since. The baobab doesn’t blend in with its surroundings; it stands out everywhere and is unignorable. The trunk is massive – some are on record at 70 feet in girth – and rises serenely skyward in a smooth and noble column. But above the majesty of the trunk, the limbs poke and zigzag out in wiry and twisted postures like electrified bottle brushes; if the trunk with its sober bottle shape looks like something Morandi might have envisaged, the branches with their nightmare curlicues resemble early Dali.

The historian and photographer Thomas Pakenham, a baobab enthusiast if there ever was one, has devoted an entire book to this behemoth. “The Remarkable Baobab” (W.W. Norton, 143 pages, $19.95) continues the quest begun in his earlier “Meetings With Remarkable Trees” (1998) and “Remarkable Trees of the World” (2002). Mr. Pakenham uses a casual, almost conversational style to convey an abundance of information about this strange tree, but his text is ultimately a succinct commentary on his photographs. Most of these are splendid; they show us the tree itself in all its moods and climes. Occasionally Mr. Pakenham succumbs to a picture-postcard approach; his image of a baobab at sunset with the crescent moon overhead is sheer tourist kitsch. It really won’t do to beautify the baobab.

The tree has provided plenty of solace in its long history (Mr. Pakenham estimates that they live for about a millennium). Its bark can be used to make roofs and cloth and rope; the seeds are delicious when toasted; the pith can be turned into a sherbet; and the seedpods are big enough to serve as cups or fishing floats. The tree itself is enormous and, inevitably perhaps, enterprising businessmen have carved cafes and bars and even hotel rooms within its bulk (a profanation Mr. Pakenham rightly deplores). Sadly enough, both the traditional and the more innovative uses of the baobab are in decline, and the tree’s future, outside botanical gardens, is uncertain.

The first European to describe the baobab was a Frenchman named Michel Adanson, who encountered a colossal baobab in August 1749 in Senegal. Adanson was wonderstruck by the tree, describing it, correctly, as “immensely larger than any other tree now existing … and probably the largest on the terrestrial globe.” It was later discovered to have eight distinct species, six of which occur in Madagascar; the others occur all over Africa, in Australia, and in the Caribbean.

Strange to say, despite its globetrotting tendencies, let alone its improbable majesty, the baobab hasn’t figured much in literature. Even the “Malgache” poets of Madagascar don’t seem to have penned odes to its grandeur. I suspect that this may be because nothing rhymes with “baobab.” Ogden Nash, who alone might have found one, seems never to have risen to this ultimate challenge.

In the end perhaps the main solace of the baobab lies in its very anomaly. It is a tree of contradictions. Even its sumptuous blossoms, which in some areas have a delicate fragrance and in others give off a smell like rotting teeth, depending on the pollinators it attracts, seem mismatched to its baggy and elephantine girth. The tree defies assimilation within our predictable imaginative landscapes; it sprouts outside our categories. Maybe that alone is solace enough.

eormsby@nysun.com